Test for URL Format

Question

I'd like to test whether the URL that the user inputs into my form is "proper", e.g. the following are proper:

http://www.google.com
www.google.com
www.google.com/

but the following probably shouldn't be:

google
http://www.go?ogle?#%

I don't have in mind what "proper" means, but is there some standard out there that I can use?

Wikipedia would be better than Google for something like this. So check here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL — Jay, Oct 19 '12 at 00:57

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 07 '21 at 05:57

In HTML5 you can use the input element with the type value url: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/states-of-the-type-attribute.html#url-state-type-url. You'd need to check which browsers already implemented a validation for it, though. If it's important, you'd also need server-side validation, of course.

Here you can see what URLs are considered valid by HTML5: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/urls.html#valid-url. It references RFC 3986 for URIs and RFC 3987 for IRIs.

You should probably have a look at RegEx for URL validation (see for example this question: PHP validation/regex for URL) or check if your library/programming-language/CMS has special functions for it.

Test for URL Format

1 Answers1